Numerous voting technologies are known. These technologies are generally directed to permitting votes to be recorded with efficacy while maintaining the secrecy of the ballot.
One category of voting technology involves the use of the paper ballot. Various methods exist for collecting and tabulating votes recorded by paper ballots. Prior art has been created to rely on paper ballots while using modern digital technology. For example, “Optical-mark Based Systems” allow voters to mark paper ballots and feed the ballots through an automated optical ballot scanning tabulator into sealed ballot boxes. The optical scanning technology determines the nature of the vote and the computer technology provides a means to quickly tabulate results. The results are transmitted to a central computer by a variety of transmission technologies. All results are tallied at the central computer.
Another category of voting technology is best described as “Mechanical Voting Systems”. These systems generally utilize mechanical counters for counting votes. These systems include lever machines and punch card ballots.
Another category of voting technology is the “Direct Recording Electronic” (DRE) system. This type of system permits voters to enter their vote into a digital system by means of an electronic interface such as a touch screen, mouse or scrolling cursor. Generally speaking, an interface device in each voting station is linked to a computer system. The results compiled by each set of voting stations are then transmitted to a central computer system using a variety of computer architectures and transmission modes.
In a variation of the DRE system, the entry of a vote into a digital system is linked to a paper receipt that is used as a voter verified paper receipt. This paper receipt can be used in a paper-based audit procedure—an operation that is impossible in a true DRE system.
There is a need for voting technologies that provide the ability to audit the election results. Democracy depends on accurate and incorruptible tabulation of voter intent; so by extension, voting technologies must be able to demonstrate vote tabulation integrity.
One of the challenges in permitting efficient verification of voting results, and also demonstration of the integrity of the vote, are the subjective elements generally involved in determining voter intent.
In accordance with numerous prior art voting technologies, the assessment of what constitutes a vote in favour of a particular candidate or a particular answer to a question is determined by subjective assessment.
This is best illustrated in the context of a manual hand count. Historically, voters would select their candidates using pen and paper, making a mark (an ‘X’ for example) beside the candidate(s) of their choice. This paper ballot would then be manually counted by election officials with candidates and their agents allowed to scrutinize the operation. However, by the very nature of elections, different parties involved with elections have very different interests. A set of candidates and their agents rarely share common motivation and accordingly the interpretation process of what constitutes a mark on a ballot has always been prone to inconsistencies. This fact generally makes it difficult to achieve the same tally when counting the same ballots multiple times, as there is no assurance that any given ballot would be interpreted the same way by every interested party. The reason for this is straightforward: often the voter would make a mark that could be deemed as ambiguous by any one of the people involved with the manual ballot count (i.e. election official or candidate agent). What may be obvious to one agent may not be obvious to another agent. In addition, many ballots were deemed ‘spoiled’ or ‘blank’ because the voter (either intentionally or unintentionally) made too many or too few marks on the ballot.
The apparent lack of objectivity was addressed in a number of prior art systems. The Mechanical Based Systems and Optical-Mark Based Systems either incremented a particular vote or not based on objective standards.
The Mechanical Based Systems have been deemed susceptible to inconsistencies in well publicized cases. For example, some mechanical punch systems have been shown to leave cut-out ‘chads’ partially attached, leading to disputes surrounding election results.
Also, in the case of Mechanical Based Systems and Optical-Mark Based Systems, the objective standards for what constitutes an indication of voter intention are generally set by the manufacturer of the voting device and have not been adaptable to conform to objective standards determined by election officials for a particular vote. For example, in Optical-Mark Based Systems an integration threshold is usually defined to establish how dark a mark has to be in order to constitute a mark recognized by the system as being such. This integration threshold is permanently set by the manufacturer.
These concerns have hindered the ability to verify vote results, and have generally had a negative impact on impressions of vote integrity.
To some extent these problems have been addressed by DRE systems. Voter intention in a DRE system is a binary input from a digital device so ambiguity cannot exist. However, it is well known that processing errors, computer memory corruption or computer memory loss can occur in digital devices and there have been well publicized reports suggesting that this may be the case with some prior art DRE systems. If this type of failure were to occur, voter intention is permanently corrupted or lost and a new election would have to be held.
In addition to the aforesaid disadvantages, the prior art solutions generally do not enable an election official to effectively audit voting results and/or verify the integrity of the vote. For example, the above mentioned prior art technologies do not permit an election official to pick a ballot at random and examine the results of the optical scan algorithms that determined voter intent. This ability to compare the paper ballot with the results collected by a vote system allows the election official to verify the accuracy of each voting unit and ensure that there are no random or systematic tabulation errors in the voting system or subsystems.
There is a need for a voting system and ballot collection apparatus that enables objective measurement of voter intention and a method to verify accurate data collection to demonstrate the integrity of the vote.